Is metabolism a red herring when predicting fish responses to climate change?

理论基础：代谢率是动物吸收能量并将其用于生存、生长和繁殖的速度。一些科学家认为，代谢率可以用来解释生态学中的一切，包括个体生命历史、物种分布以及生态系统如何应对气候变化。这个项目将在海洋鱼类中探索这个令人兴奋的想法。代谢研究通常使用基础代谢率(BMR)，当动物不活动时测量。野生动物的行为可能与实验室水箱中不活动的动物非常不同，在这种情况下，使用新陈代谢理论来预测物种对气候变化的反应可能会非常具有误导性。在这个项目中，我们将询问代谢理论在应用于田间代谢率(FMR)时是否有效，FMR包括觅食、运动和繁殖的能量需求。FMR在海洋动物中很难测量，但最近开发了一种新的海洋鱼类的地球化学指标(Trueman等人，2016)。该项目将收集第一个大型的、统计上可比较的海洋鱼类FMR数据集，并检验以下假设：FMR随身体大小和温度而系统地变化。系统发育关系和/或功能基团影响FMR的分级。FMR比BMR更能预测宏观生态模式。

Rationale:Metabolic rate is the rate at which an animal takes in energy and uses it for survival, growth and reproduction. Some scientists suggest that metabolic rate can be used to explain everything in ecology, including individual life histories, species distributions, and how ecosystems respond to climate change. This project will explore this exciting idea in marine fishes.Often metabolic studies use basal metabolic rate (BMR), measured when the animal is inactive. Animals in the wild may behave very differently from inactive animals in laboratory tanks, in which case using metabolic theory to predict species response to climate change could be very misleading. In this project we will ask whether metabolic theory 'works' when applied to field metabolic rate (FMR), which includes the energetic demands of foraging, movement and reproduction. FMR is difficult to measure in marine animals, but a novel geochemical proxy has recently been developed for marine fishes (Trueman et al 2016).This project will assemble the first large, statistically comparable dataset of FMR within marine fishes, and test the following hypotheses:FMR scales systematically with body size and temperature. Phylogenetic relationships and/or functional groups influence FMR scaling.FMR is a better predictor of macroecological patterns than BMR.